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Top 10 Tech This Week: CES Edition [PICS]

Top 10 Tech This Week (1/14/2012)

1. Samsung 55-inch OLED HDTV

There were a couple of examples of the latest in OLED HDTV technology at CES 2012, and this one was from Samsung. It's a 55-inch display that looks simply spectacular, with rich, deep blacks, supersaturated color, extra sharp picture and it's thinner than my little finger.

Look for this one to be available before the end of the year, at an as-yet-undisclosed price, probably around $8,000. Because these screens are relatively easy to manufacture, expect those prices to drop precipitously within the next year or two.

2. HP Spectre Laptop

In a clever piece of laptop engineering, HP has shoehorned a 14-inch screen into a 13-inch laptop form factor. This 3.79-pound beauty looks almost exactly like a gigantic iPhone when you have it closed, with a Gorrilla Glass top, screen and handrest.

Only available with a solid-state drive (or two if you wish), it packs serious specs with your choice of Intel Core i3 or i5 processors inside. Pick one up in February for around $1,400.

4. HYT H1 Hydro-Mechanical watch

This unusual watch was not shown at CES 2012, but because it's so downright weird and cool, we couldn't leave it out. It's the first of its kind. It uses tiny pistons that move a bellows, which then compresses a glowing green liquid that indicates hours, minutes and seconds.

So there you have it, wearing a miniature pump on your wrist, showing you the time that flows through tubes. You start the whole thing in motion by winding it up, just like old-fashioned watches. Astonishing.

This has got to be the craziest timepiece we've ever seen, filling us with want. Alas, it's out of our reach, costing a rumored $45,000.

6. Wowee Foam Fighters

This cute little toy airplane is part of a flight simulator game from Wowee called Foam Fighters. For $9.99, you get this tiny plane that attaches to your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch or Android smartphone, situated right in front of its camera. Then, when you download the game you see a realistic-looking flight simulator with your toy plane in the foreground. Available in April.

7. Sharp 80-Inch HDTV

You can't be too rich, too thin, or have too large of an HDTV screen, and Sharp is more than happy to accommodate. Prices on gigantic screens such as this 80-inch model are coming down, retailing for $6500 and to be found on the Internet for even less.

This model LC-80LE632U lived up to its brand name, with tack-sharp video, great color and enormous size. It'll be shipping in April for $6499, which sounds like a lot, but considering that TVs this size were costing four times that much about a year ago, it's not a bad deal.

8. Fisker Karma

The Fisker Karma hybrid electric car is just getting into production, and its makers are taking the car on a U.S. tour to show it off. Here we got a chance to sit in one, and we're here to tell you -- this is one swank vehicle. Easing our 6-foot+ frames down into the vehicle, we found it’s seriously low-slung (as any good sports car should be). Once you sit down it feels like you’re wearing it rather than sitting in it.

The super luxurious interior and sporty exterior of the Fisker Karma is certainly not cheap, with prices starting at $100,000. We encountered this car in the middle of a hotel ballroom, slightly disappointed that we couldn’t take it out on the road for a quick spin.

9. Sony Crystal LED TV

For the first time, Sony showed off its Crystal LED TV, a 55-inch display that works in a different way from conventional HDTVs, resulting in noticeably better video quality.

This is some brand new tech -- instead of liquid crystal dots being illuminated by a backlight as they are in conventional LCD HDTVs, this display creates its image with 6 million microscopic points of light directly shining from the front of the display. This results in an exceptionally bright and vivid image, the best we saw at CES 2012.

When can we get one? Sony's not saying -- it was a tech demo. Watch our video about the Crystal LED to get the full scoop from Sony LED TV Product Manager Arturo Jordan.

10. Fulton Innovation Wireless Charger

Now this is the way to charge up an electric car: wirelessly. Fulton Innovation showed off its wireless charger at CES 2012, which will working with one part of it buried in the floor of your garage, and the other attached to the underside of an electric car -- in this case, a Tesla Roadster.

A downside? At best, the efficiency of such wireless charging might reach just 89% by the time it's available at least a year from now, less efficient than the 96% of a wired charger.

LAS VEGAS — Taking a tumultuous trip to Las Vegas this week, your intrepid Top 10 Tech This Week correspondents encountered a veritable feast of gadgetry and technological innovation. So we deemed it fitting to show you the best tech we saw at CES 2012, of course keeping with our theme of sticking with all things techy and futuristic — ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous.

For those of you who don't care for CES 2012, stick with us — you might find a surprise or two that wasn't shown at CES but dazzled us all the same. Sit back, prepare yourself for astonishment, and join us for the Top 10 Tech This Week, brought to you this week from fabulous Las Vegas.

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